This extraordinary eulogy was received with vociferous applause, especially by the French Count, whose air was that of a man enjoying a personal triumph. Molly Finucane, who had not been to Mass or Confession for many years, but who had not quite shaken off her early impressions, tried to disguise her nervousness by hammering the table with her wineglass till it broke—an accident which she was half disposed to interpret as the work of an offended Power.
The Duke of Trent, who entertained a vague respect for the Roman Church as a venerable institution whose influence was generally exerted on the side of the Conservative party, hardly knew what to think of this equivocal homage to its merits. The Honourable Gerald St. John passed on to the question of hooliganism, not without a shy glance in the direction of the Home Secretary, which showed how much the jest was enhanced by the presence of hooliganism’s official adversary.
The hooligans, he declared, were crusaders fighting for the same cause as that Dishonourable Brotherhood. They were martyrs of the new individualism. Their so-called outrages constituted a protest—the only form of protest which dull and hidebound statesmen could understand—against the iron yoke of Socialist civilization, under which they were all groaning. He regarded the hooligans as saviours. It was significant that so far the man whom they had selected for attack was that embodiment of everything vulgar and virtuous, the suburban ratepayer. When they had exterminated the ratepayer, he hoped they would go on to the millionaire. He had always regretted that their fellow-workers, the Anarchists, should show so much antipathy to Kings. It was an unreasonable prejudice. Kings were picturesque survivals in the midst of the hideous monotony of modern life. Kings were rarely respectable, and were not seldom steeped in crime; and this applied particularly to those romantic claimants—he, the speaker, preferred the dear old name “Pretender”—whom their Dishonourable Brother on the left was seeking to restore.
This allusion was accepted by Des Louvres with eager manifestations of approval. Once more the Secretary of State felt an obscure uneasiness as he compared these mocking utterances with the recent experience of his own department, and he began to ask himself if he was indeed listening to the first whispers of a coming storm.
Hero Vanbrugh’s question about the Legitimist Guild had not fallen on deaf ears. He had had the curiosity to ask his permanent staff if they knew anything of the Legitimists, and he found they knew very little. There is nothing Government Departments dislike so much as information, except the trouble of acting on it. No one in the Home Office could say exactly who the Legitimists were, or how they had come into existence as a guild. Their very number was unknown, but it was believed to be insignificant. They were wholly without influence or following, and would never have been heard of but for the fact that the newspapers regarded their proceedings as a good joke. Every sensible person put them down as a clique of vain and foolish young men who made themselves supremely ridiculous by trying to revive a cause which had been dead for a hundred and fifty years.
Such was the official view. Sixty or seventy years before a similar view had been taken of the action of a little clique of Oxford men who were setting themselves to undo the work of the Protestant Reformation. That little clique had undertaken to break up a settlement which had taken root for two hundred and fifty years, and had survived twelve reigns and six rebellions. In the course of a single reign they had come within sight of their goal. They had driven the word “Protestant” out of polite conversation, and made it a synonym for everything base, ignorant and malicious. They had made it dangerous for a Protestant to object publicly to Catholic practices which were still forbidden by the letter of the law. They had sent an informal embassy to the Vatican to negotiate the re-entry of England into the Roman obedience; and they had delivered the first open attack on the legislative bars which still hindered that consummation.
Fresh from the assurances of the Home Office, it was a shock to the Minister to find himself for the second time that day confronted with this ridiculous but offensive movement. It was true that Mr. St. John’s remarks bordered on satire, but the serious-minded are apt to resent satire at the expense of what they fear, as much as at the expense of what they revere; the only notes they wish to hear are the snap of cavil and the rumble of denunciation.
If the Duke of Trent had consulted his own inclination he would have risen and protested against this trifling with treason. But, like most men who are deprived of the sense of humour, James Stuart was keenly sensitive to ridicule, and he dared not expose himself to the merciless wit of this crew of profligates. He bitterly repented the false step he had taken in sitting down amongst them, but he sought in vain for any means of extrication.
Meanwhile the orator concluded with a felicitous reference to the occasion of the feast.
One Dishonourable Brother—in fact, the founder of their Order, he said—had shown that it was possible to emulate, if not to surpass, the exploits of the humble hooligan. By his magnificent defiance of the day before he had struck dismay into the mercenary ranks of their hereditary foes—he need not say he meant the trading class, whose shameful supremacy had made England unfit to live in. Their gallant host had plundered the hostile camp of a sum which represented one of the greatest triumphs ever achieved over the Philistine. He called upon him, in their name, not to pay this canaille a farthing in the pound. And he called upon them to drink confusion to the respectable classes, coupled with the name of their Arch Decadent!